Alumni Profiles

Alice H. Chen ’02, MBA ’09: Influencing Development in China

By Sherrie Negrea

Alice H. Chen has worked
for Jones Lang LaSalle, a
financial and professional
services firm specializing in real estate, in Tianjin, China for less than two years, but she
is already involved in one of the most ambitious developments in the country: a global
financial center proposed for a peninsula in the heart of Tianjin’s business district, Binhai.
Acting as a project manager, Chen is representing an American private equity fund that
is investing in a 39-floor office tower,
one of 120 buildings planned for the
peninsula of Yujiapu. “They’re building
the Manhattan of China — literally,”
Chen says.

After earning an architecture
degree from Cornell, Chen worked for
Gensler and Howard Spivak Architects
in New York City while launching her
own company with another Cornell
graduate, Sally Park ’03, MBA ’10. But
Chen, a Taiwanese native who moved
to Texas at the age of 10, wanted to
return to Asia after completing her MBA
because that corner of the world was
where real estate was booming. In early
2010, she moved to Beijing and worked
for an architecture office until she was hired by Jones Lang LaSalle in October.
Tianjin, a second-tier city with a population of 12.9 million, has a rapidly developing
office sector, which made it attractive to Chen. “If you’re in Beijing or Shanghai — they’re
pretty much developed,” she says. “There’s not that much opportunity to have an influence.
Here I get to be involved in a project from its initial stages and meet real estate professionals
from around the world.”

As the office’s head of strategic consulting and research, Chen and her team help developers determine where, when, and how to build a project and evaluate their strategic entrance into the Tianjin market. When she arrived in Tianjin, Chen pledged to increase her unit’s performance and team size. After her first year, both revenue and the team more than doubled. “I hope to keep up the momentum going in the coming year," she says.